12

We're looking for a CMS that we can use as the basis for a new product we're rolling out.

As it's principally a content based thing, we need to base everything on a CMS, but there's a few things we need:

  • As we're supporting tens - hundreds of users, we ideally need a multi-tenant CMS (single shared code base), that can support different designs per site
  • As we're selling in functionality, we need something that will let us deploy a new 'module' and switch it on/off on a per site basis
  • We prefer stuff that is open source (PHP or Rails, that sort of thing)

Before I consider building something, is there anything out there that's any good?

Neil Middleton
  • 22,105
  • 18
  • 80
  • 134
  • https://frappe.io/frappe and https://directus.io/ are both OSS framework with multi-tenants support by design! I recently was looking at a similar thing, and those 2 are really out of the league, and I'd never heard of them! Check out https://www.cmswire.com/web-cms/13-headless-cmss-to-put-on-your-radar/ for a 2020 list. – Vadorequest Mar 31 '20 at 20:47

6 Answers6

8

Now I am biased, but dotCMS 1.9 is a flexible open source solution (java) that was designed to make running tens or hundreds of sites within a single instance easy. You can create site "templates" and use them again and again as needed them. Sites can share content, assets and templates, or not share anything depending on how you set them up. Users can have access to manage one site or many sites - their views into the management tool are limited by their permissions (as you'd expect). Again, I obviously am biased as I work for the company, but this is exactly the problem that dotCMS 1.9 was designed to solve.

wezell
  • 573
  • 3
  • 7
1

Plone sounds like it'd do what you want.

It's written in Python, on top of Zope, and supports multiple distinct sites (with distinct and/or shared users, groups, styling). Extra functionality is added through 'products'; there are a number of Free extensions and it's quite easy to write your own too.

Andrew Aylett
  • 39,182
  • 5
  • 68
  • 95
1

We use http://www.alfresco.com/ ...seems to fit your definition . Different designs per site can be achieved with what they call "web scripts" . It supports deployment and branching infrastructure that you can leverage to for your different clients

Surya
  • 4,922
  • 8
  • 41
  • 54
1

As we're supporting tens - hundreds of users, we ideally need a multi-tenant CMS (single shared code base), that can support different designs per site

My first thought when I read that was WordpressMU (perhaps with Buddypress if you need groups, etc?), but it might not be "CMS" enough for your needs... you don't elaborate on which features of a CMS you are looking for (media management, workflows, etc), so it's a bit hard to recommend one.

Chris
  • 6,568
  • 3
  • 22
  • 21
1

DotNetNuke supports multi-tenant operation, and has a fairly active marketplace for add on modules, skins etc. It has pretty well defined module development interfaces as well.

Mark
  • 11
  • 1
0

Yanel is a Java/XML/XSLT based CMS (Apache 2.0 license) designed for multi-tenancy and one can run arbitrary many sites inside the same Yanel instance, whereas see in particular the documentation on 'realms'.

j0k
  • 22,600
  • 28
  • 79
  • 90
Michael Wechner
  • 1